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> We implemented a heat map, and it was often shocking how much a seemingly innocuous aspect of a material could impact ray counts. Definitely. I think that "
by a_e_k 4y ago
> We implemented a heat map, and it was often shocking how much a seemingly innocuous aspect of a material could impact ray counts.
Definitely. I think that "you don't know until you profile" applies just as much to optimizing renders as it does to optimizing code.
> Of course this was pre-pathtracing, so it showed up differently.
Yep, I remember those days of distribution ray tracing. There were all sorts of tricks to keep the ray trees under control, like lowering the number of glossy or shadow samples the deeper you were in the tree. I don't miss them. Pathtracing made things so much easier to tune.
- taylorius 4y agoOh definitely! So much easier now. After Rendition we did another version called Spraytrace which tried to force mental ray into more of a pathtracing type mode of operation, (eliminating ray branching, rather than light transport) by faking the mental ray api return values, and overlaying our own sampling. It worked, but was rather a hack. God knows why we didn't just see the writing on the wall, and write a path tracing renderer. :-)